Buying an used SSD?

Buying an used SSD?

Can we buy an used SSD hard disk that is selling for a bargain? Think twice. While installing an SSD hard disk as the OS drive in your laptop is the best upgrade you can make in terms of the speed up and the saving of time, but in this case buying an used SSD is not a good idea.

There are several reasons why I will not suggest buying a used second-hand Solid State Drive:

1 – Limited Write count. SSDs can only be written to a limited number of times, and every write, uses up a portion of an SSD’s life unlike traditional spinning hard drives,. And since you can never know how many times a used drive has already been written to and what is its write count - before buying it -  you have no way of knowing how much life is still left in it

2- Dead cells count: Even though a used SSD might be working fine, it could contain non-working memory cells – a condition that tends to deteriorate once an SSD starts to fail in this aspect.

3 – New SSDs are affordable. While I accept that SSD’s are more expensive per Gigabyte of storage space than hard drives cost-wise, their prices have reduced greatly, of late. Decent sized SSDs are quite affordable these days and add the amount of time you would be saving!

4- Veracity - No one knows if the used SSD is second-hand or third-hand or even worse. After all the age of the SSD is not an indicator of its health. So better be safe than sorry.

In fact, you can pick up an awesome Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD for less than $200 on Amazon. The cost extra will certainly pay for itself in the long run.


Bottom-line: I feel that it is a much better deal buying a new one than paying for a used drive that might not last very long especially if it is the primary drive in your main laptop or computer.

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links. Amazon prices are subject to change.